Sonder

[Anna Konstantaki]

10 hours ago, Extreme Z7 said:

What? What's going on? What is this?

What? No reason to stress. 

What´s going on? There was frustration going on. Quite expectable when working on stuff for uni and parallel to that doing self development...

What is this? Me, being honest? Sometimes I feel like an complete idiot and I just wanted to express that. Maybe I did not get it ALL wrong but heh... Most? A lot? 

...There is a shift going on here but it´s all a little complicated and I don´t have much time to journal on everything... These days feel great by the way. I am doing great. It´s just that it is not easy... But what´s easy? Patience... Patience...

[Anna Konstantaki]

What do death metal and opera have in common? Well, in both cases I don´t understand a word they say...

Aa... What a bitter sweet episode today, right? 

This gave me a lot of answers actually about what to focus on at this point of the journey. I had made this deal with myself to work on fixing all of the sort of "basic needs" I still have unmet in about a span of the next 5 years... But my curiosity for the more advanced personal development topics has lead my inpired mind to try to understand, work, incorporate it all as much as possible already, even though at the moment what has to be done is to "lean back" and let it sit... Yes, I do self inquiry and meditation etc. but I am far from being able to talk about these topics to others in depth. I still catch myself in situations where I feel ressistance out of nowhere and I have found to feel guilt for enjoying life after some degree. It´s not that strong and once aware of it, I can relax again and happily move on but it´s a little reminder that I still have to undo certain functions this mind takes on... It is really mostly important to first master the emotions and psychology, then use that good state to take even more action in whatever domain in life it is needed at that time and then... THEN one can start thinking more seriously about enlightenment and such. So paradoxicaly, even though spirituality is one main and ever more overtaking thing in my life, it is the one I am working on, well I should be (sometimes should-statements are helpful) with the slowest pace, practically at least. Not that the hour of meditation this morning for example was not intense, or all this thinking, writing and analyzing isn´t but it´s just the tips tip of the iceberg...

I like seeing how from being an absolute overthinker in life, I am becoming a doer, I have really become so much more of a doer. The other day the housekeeper came to our floor here in the students dorm and by the time the others where still complaining and arguing around about the problem that was presented to us to solve, I immediately, even if it meant to clean away others peoples garbage and make a plan, I started working on the solution, movitated the others to solve this immediately and with pleasure and happiness got the issue out the way... There are so many moments though where I know I need to take time to do some self inquiry instead of work on something else, like for example something related to housework or studying and back in time I´d blame myself for "being lazy" but now I see this kind of energy taking procedure is not lazyness at all, it was my way to understanding myself better, it was completely nessecary and starts to pay off... Oh it REALLY starts to pay off... So here I am... Slowly finding my balance here and getting in this... This rhythm of slow and constant growth and moving away from all that unhealthy circle of action, drama and comedy  my life was before. 

I woke up this morning and felt like it was christmas by the way... Really happy to be alive. 

[Anna Konstantaki]

When I was like... 17 I think I started to listen to his songs "Love Someone" and  "Fly with with me", then I found "Made/Made It", which is  my favorite of him and now this artist released just another song to raise awareness. I think he is a good example of someone who has found his small ammount of followers, which are people who care about reality, truth and consciousness...  I really feel like supporting people like Dub Fx  so I will post his new song here... 

 

[Anna Konstantaki]

7621

this is my last day. My flight is tomorrow... Since the weather is not too great to stay outside I decided to watch some videos on Youtube... This one here is adding to the trickyness of our minds. It´s talking about something they call " cognitive ease", which I believe is highly in interplay with our homeostatic mechanisms, a sub-category I´d say... As the title kind of pre-reveals, this mechanism tricks us to think that something is true, though it isn´t...

We learn through repetition... But we don´t choose when to learn and when not-we unconsciously learn 24/7... So, heh-we learn many things we do not really want to? We learn things we don´t know we learn... Then we assume they are true... We don´t know that we don´t know... Once again.

[Anna Konstantaki]

thoughts on Jesus

... Jesus. Yes, Jesus. Not religiously talking, just some new ways of seeing this historical (as it seems)person, I am discovering for myself...

Leo once mentioned Jesus along with Budha and how they have the characteristics of great meditators and enlightened people. What can we really learn from these stories? What is the truth about Jesus? 

Okay, people didn´t see that the man who called himself the son of god called everyone around brothers and sisters, which would mean that they are children of god as well... So Jesus had to talk very simply to them and as it is with that gap between teachers and students, it can be really hard to start from somewhere, especially when what is tought has many levels and shades and might be something they do not want to hear because it might mean that they were wrong, or did wrong or will be wrong... It might mean that they have to change... What does this remind us of? Self development... 

This reminds me of something one of my professors once said, he had done fieldwork in Africa and he said that if you tell certain people there a story about some great king who bravely died for his people they might not like the story and even note that if the king lost his throne and was murdered, he must have been not been good enough, unworthy and deserved it... 

Anyways, so he was not some super human with superpowers, doing wonders, and resurrecting from the dead... He was a master of... Self... Eh... Knowledge? A master of emotions, peace and truth. How do we know? Well, he could "suffer" on a cross but his ability to distinct awareness from thought, to detach the experience from pain, from himself and his  love for everyone and everything-from unconditional happiness and peace, which are, as we learned all possible abilities one can train with a lot of labor and patience (bet the gap of information about his early adulthood comes from the fact that it was absolutely boring-he was probably meditating day and night...), these allowed him to slow down the system so much that he was believed to be dead... Then he got some time to recover and... Well, he came back and everyone thought he resurrected from the dead. Sounds all less spectacular, but would make some sense.

I wonder what happened first... Did first Jesus talk to "god" or "god" talk to Jesus? I am not sure if Jesus was really hearing a voice he called god and if that would make him slightly mentally ill or super special... But if he heard that voice, it was produced somewhere, it came from somewhere, it was real to him, it had an enormous impact on him and his behavior and on others... My theory is more that he drew the wisdom from himself, from learning by himself. Looks like Jesus distinguished still between god and himself but maybe this is just how others interpreted it through his words. Is it likely that something spoke to him or likely that he created this dialog himself? If he created the let´s call it "god dialog" himself, then how did he do it? Maybe he cultivated awareness and let everything enter his perception, he applied thought to his observations, i.e. logic, order and critical thinking and tried us much as he could to translate his realizations and positive feelings into actions and spread them with language...
What did "his father" teach him after all? Simple things, respect, compassion, patience, the power of forgiving, justice, morals, love... Love. Anything else the father gave his son? I don´t think so... The son earned it all himself, he "fought the demons" in the desert, he was alone all the time untill he found his students and even those left him at some point... What is Jesus a symbol for? A half god, blessed and superior? Unreachable? Or a symbol for a small human that found joy in the hardest path he could have chosen? A little human with a couple of values and a life purpose? If Jesus was human and had these abilities, then we can be like him. Can we become like him? That is the question between every heros story, can we be like them? 

We won´t ever be more or less than anybody else but we have the potential to be like Jesus or Budha or Gandhi etc., so paradoxicaly we can grow endlessly but that means nothing. The hierarchy melts away. Nothing is a big deal, if history changing or not, we all matter but at the same time we don´t. Butterfly effects in the stories of our lives and of those we influence, in the history of humanity vs. the fact that we had a start as a human and as a species-so we will have an end too...

Eitherway, we also know now, that it is not weird at all that Jesus had no wife... Why would he need this kind of love or relationship?
He had a relationship with "god" already and his existance was probably feeling at least orgasmic most of the time... He had so much bliss inside him, you could give him a sponge of vinegar to drink and he´d not mind you, he really wouldn´t...

We don´t need to become like him, we don´t need to believe that he was even a real person that existed but it looks like that he was. He was just a guy who walked the spiritual path untill the very end. He would never want anyone to do fasting for him because he suffered, or burn candles, or pray... He would want people to open their minds to their potential, which is the same as his was. God made man by his picture. Yes, because this god word is just another word for everything, everything is like us and we are like everything because we are one, one big perceiving nothing? Well, okay, here comes the part I haven´t figured out yet and before I could say anything, I can at least already tell that it´s awesome!

[Anna Konstantaki]

 

 

[Anna Konstantaki]

7629

Meditation. Swimming. One dive from diving platform. Walking home. Gypsies. Gypsies mistake for one of their people ...

I was watching some interviews of people who used to be part of the GOA hippy movement in their youth with my bro yesterday... https://www.youtube.com/user/goahippytribe/videos Some of them seemed spiritually very developed by the time the interview was taken. The issue of drugs came up again and again (they did not mention shrooms by the way). Most times in a negative sense. There were some exceptions though...  I think these people/ cases of development are great examples for one to see what happens when one has some spiritual understanding of life already vs not while making experiences with drugs. I used to wonder why drugs (all kinds) even exist and how different the world would be without them. Now I know that they are neither good nor bad. The hand full of people who's awareness and understanding makes a real gain out of these experiences have such a visibly beautiful development that I can completely support the thought of certain consciousness enhancing drugs as a powerful tool to help one grow at some point of the journey.

Back to the video from Sunday... Which is actually heavy material once one manages to get the pictures of Leo hugging buckets, toilet seats and laughing wrapped in a blanket and all that out of ones head. I wonder how it must be like to discover self actualization watching this as the first video... My brother said that he thinks the most important part of the video is, as he understood it, that neither what or how Leo perceived the world during his experience with shrooms, nor what we normally perceive is what's closer to reality as it is, so there must something in between here. I saw more the point in the fact that it is possible to access existential love, to have, as Leo called it, ontological orgasms and all that... This actually reminded me of this women who had some interesting consciousness altering experience after a stroke and went to "lala-land" for a while, experienced oneness and came back...

What can I say? It's all very interesting but I am not qualified to speak I guess. Isn't it great that we have art and people can give us a glimpse into their experiences somehow? Trances and floral patterns you said, right?

 

[Anna Konstantaki]

7634

Okay, so you say except from magic mushrooms and a hand full of other substances, everything else has zero development value? Guess it´s only those listed in the latest video then...

I just remembered this guy here talking about his mushroom experience and how his life changed through it... He did some mistakes in preparing but it´s still interesting to listen to... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UlFazaBmv4 I mean... Mushrooms for "treating" sociopathy? 

 

 

 

Edited August 8, 2016 by Anna Konstantaki

[Anna Konstantaki]

7635

So uhm... I am filling up my "holes" here... And um... Uh, let´s just talk about meditation. 

Meditation by the sea is great. Tried it only twice since I am here but I want to do it again... There is so much noise from the waves and there´s wind and sunlight and all that, so that you´ll be busy with those for a while eitherway. Then you can observe how your body responds to them and then there is detaching from that and going inside, which paradoxically let´s you melt even more into the environment. But what is this energy and happiness? Is that a response to the external, the elements, or is it coming from within?

In general I can say that the beginning is usually okay, then there comes a nice part, then there comes a part where I play with the thought of moving and escaping and then there comes an interesting part which prooves that I could keep sitting like that for much more time than I thought and I am feeling that my head somehow loves and my body-... Parts of it absolutely hate it (my legs usually and my spine and the muscles around there) but then it takes all power there is to concentrate into holding onto meditation and onto kind of relaxing into all discomfort. Around that point I usually end the whole thing with a huge sigh of relief... Maybe I should take the time to test how long I can last but I think that is an inauthentic approach. This is a practice and not some sort of sport to break personal records... Or can we compare it to sports? I mean, it´s the opposite of movement... And it´s not competitive but it´s definitely closer to exersice than cooking, studying, writing, eating... Who cares? You sit there and all of a sudden you don´t even want to do the programm anymore and chase all that goals, you just want to sit there and enjoy untill the hard part kicks in, but even the hard part has something so nice about it but still, the desicion to actually sit down again next day is not completely easy...

To be honest I feel like I have no idea what I am doing but sometimes my mind creates weird experiences. The other day I was feeling like little waves were hitting my head from right and then left and it felt as if electricity and fluids go ´round in there but it was a good feeling all in all and then there was this no past thought and half of everything got white and then the no future thought and the rest got white too and then the white shrunk into a white light ball but that ball was becoming bigger again and it magnetized me, it felt like I was it anyways  but it sort of soaked a bit on my prefrontal cortex and that felt SO good, like for a splittsecond I became one with that-It was that feeling you get when you love someone and you put your heads together and you want to feel their brain, melt together, open your head and his and... Uh... I am bad at explaining those things, but it was as if this desire for immersion or coalision was fulfilled, even if just for that second. Without flesh flying around, people dying, like in le Parfum or something. But it was still uncanny and scary and weird and I am not sure if I am ready to leave in that sense because I know very, very well that this goes much further. I know that it was all just a mental representation, very imaginative and not real. But what I felt was real to me. All I know is that it was amazing and scary and created and percieved. 

What is it you want Anna? You want freedom, flexibility, energy and playfulness? You want your family to be nice? You want the "holes" closedand all pains forever stop? You want nice people around? What do you want? You want to be enlightened? You don´t want to be enlightened, you are not even trying. And you know it. Or what about success? You are not even trying. You have reached so much, changed so much in the last months but you are still nothing but your fears. Just do it. GIVE. RECEIVE. From yourself. Not selfish. GOOD. Very... Joda... Syntax. Not... Nah...

 

 

[Anna Konstantaki]

Last week I watched "Room" (2015), which is a drama film about a girl/woman and her son who are being kept in a room for seven years. The boy has never seen the outside world before but with his mothers instructions he manages to escape and sees the real world for the first time. If we ignore the fact that he is way too smart and healthy for someone who has never been outside in his life (TV, his young mother and the ubductor are all he could learn from) , the way he is responding to the new environment(s) is depicted really good. Don´t watch the trailer-it´s filled with spoilers. Building up awareness and doing self actualization is a little like that. It´s a little bit like looking back and seeing that you used to live in "Room", all you knew was "Room", you could not imagine something outside of "Room" and if anyone told you about all those things out there (and "in here") and that they are  real you´d call them crazy liers who try to trick you in some way. You´d be angry, you´d hold onto "Room" for a while untill seeing the possibilities of this much bigger world with much more to see and do. The outer world might not fill your expectations (problem of the mother once she gets rescued) but you also have to allow yourself to be happy in paradise, risk and explore (boy having tons of new toys, new foods to taste, clothes to wear, friends to make...). Especially if you suffer from some sort of mental illness, it´s like you are living in a small, small room. Your perception is tiny, your ability to find solutions to your problems are tiny, your energy is tiny. If you get out of there it will be a complete mystery to you how the heck you lived in there for so long. And the people who hurt you, you will wonder how they can bare such a painful life, why make everything so hard? I was facing some demons today but they were not really mine... 

 

[egoeimai]

I k r.

Awesome movie.

[Anna Konstantaki]

This mind is so tricky. It´s so tricky. 

I was, by the way thinking of the music video to the song "the island" by pendulum. 

The woman is running to chase the future, she running behind her future self.

In the future her then present self is being hunted by her past self but she does not know because she is busy always hunting the to that spot in time visible future self. 

At one point the future self stands still and looks back at her present self, from her perspective past self  which is a prediction for what will  happen with her in the future, namely she will look back and become aware of the fact that she is being chased  and is chasing at the same time. 

The future self then disappears from that hill it was standing on. The present self is running to the hill to see what happened. On the other side of the hill she can see how the future self fell down and is now disappearing in light and reappearing unaware. This time it´s her (present self) who is falling from the hill, losing her senses and then waking up and  repeating the story. 

We can however make some assumptions:

1. we could be running in circles, repeating what we do forever
2. we can become aware of that
3. we will see that at some point in the future we end (light) but come back 
4. the only way to break this circle is to stop trying to catch something we can´t and we do not need.
5. we already know and have everything we could possibly need because our past and future selfs know just as little and are just as confused, scared and lost as we are now. 
6. live in the now, surrender 
7. the notion of time, of past, present and future might be illusive themselves

I had made a spiral of pictures and photos on my bedrooms wall some years ago. 
In the middle of the spiral I had placed the maze sign of that band. I still listen to their music from time to time.
I did not really understand the meaning of the particular video for a long time. Who knows? Maybe my interpretation is wrong... I just wanted to share...   
 

Edited August 12, 2016 by Anna Konstantaki

[Anna Konstantaki]

I think this says a lot about this self...

A couple of years ago my best friend asked me with who I´d try to become friends with if I lived in Hogwarts. My answer was Luna Lovegood. She was one of the most extraordinary characters to me. The way she was moving in the world, the way she was talking but also the way she seemed distant and away from the others but at the same time observed, understood and knew so much. From the outside she looks quite (only quite) ordinary but the inside... The inside must be lightyears from that of the other. All knowledge from a Hermiony Granger or all bravery from a Harry Potter or whichever trade of the others was not as interesting as an alien perspective of a creature like Luna. Her peace and silence and vulnerability were just so beautiful. I appreciated it that J.K. Rowling created a character like that to cross Harry Potters way with a special friendship. Friendship. Because romantic relationships are more for human like, more ordinary people, am I right Joan? She just had bigger fish to fry...

[Anna Konstantaki]

You see... It´s not very motivating to hear this... Scientists have a hard time to create truthful information... Should I say create or find? 

Note the end of the video. If we delude ourselves using scientific methods, then how often do we delude ourlselves not using them? He says it is still far more relyable than any other way of knowing we have. And I am wondering here: Is this stage orange defending itself? And who cares? Science is valuable eitherway....But I am starting to see it a bit like a game... Make theories, studies, experiments and don´t expect anything from the outcome. If you´re lucky, you found a grain of truth, very rarely a bigger chunk and that´s it. If you create objects, or technology from your truth, your studies and make profit or if you make ideas, models, knowledge that are harder to sell or are even critizing the business, then don´t assume that truth can only be found in one of those ways, that one is better than the other because both can and have changed the world. Both have power. We love to study how things function in order to manipulate them and make them function better or in a way serving for us. And that is fine up to some point. Do we care about the process and what´s true, after all? Or just about the power? Do we care, if we understand, that we understand, that something is real or do we care about the outcome? My generation is growing up in a world of outcomes. If, then what do we assume about the outcomes or the people who made them possible? What do we assume being right and being true? As a child I thought adults know what they are doing, especially people who teach other people any kind of stuff, because why would they be teaching if they were not knowing what they do, right? Whatever you contribute to, if science or parenting or any other domain, you´ll never be more or less then anybody else, just like the information you know and create won´t be. I feel like talking about this is important just as much as it is a waste of time (if it exists and can somehow  be wasted but that´s another discussion). 

[Anna Konstantaki]

[Anna Konstantaki]

 ...That´s how I want to be like when I´m old... or at least... something similar...  

...And my last day here on the island is coming to its end... And I have a couple thousand things to journal about but---let´s better slow down... I´ll be running like a guinea pig in a  wheel very soon again... And-whoops somebody is on the door... Let´s end this entry real quiiick

 

[Anna Konstantaki]

Good morning world!   I bless you!

[Anna Konstantaki]

Longivety pitfall: You dedicate so much time into preserving body and mind in order to have more time living so that you can learn and experience things that interest you that in the end you don´t have time for exactly those things. 

Edited August 21, 2016 by Anna Konstantaki

[Anna Konstantaki]

Sounds like a lifetime of homework to me ...

give me some silence...

my head feels exhausted...

at least I get what you say...

 

[Anna Konstantaki]

yesterday I spontaneously interviewed my inner child. I took the whole thing on video. The nuances of sarcasm of my side and her very honest and simple responses on the other... It started funny... But it ended sad with a very sad aftertaste. I don´t know what to do with her. I don´t need to do anything with her. Just take care of us, me... Of both. Nobody will thank me for this but it was totally worth it.